And Washington Washington [US]November 27 (ANI): British engineers are working on a process to extract oxygen from lunar dust, leaving behind a metal powder that can be printed in 3D in building materials for the Moon base.
That could be the initial step in setting up an extra terrestrial oxygen extraction plant. This will help enable exploration on the moon and sustain life, avoiding the enormous cost of sending material from Earth.
Produced The Xigen was mostly used to make rocket fuel, but it could provide air to lunar settlers.
The project is part of ESA’s preparations to establish a permanent and sustainable lunar presence. Astronauts will live and work on the moon, where they will help develop and test the techniques needed for deep space missions.
The lunar regolith, a thin layer of dusty rock covering the moon, is not so different from the minerals found on Earth. By weight, it contains about 45 percent oxygen which binds to metals such as iron and titanium, making it unavailable.
The British company Metallisis has already developed a mineral extraction process that is used by the world’s industries to make metals for production.
Earlier this year, the simulated moon was shown to work well with Regolith.
The electrochemical process takes place in a specially designed chamber – the one used for research is about the size of the washing machine. The oxygen-containing material is immersed in molten salt, heated to 950 C.
The current then passes through it, which excites the oxygen to the outside ka racted va and transfers it around the liquid salt to collect on the electrode, leaving a mixture of metal powders.
As part of the current project, metallurgy engineers are adapting the technology well with its lunar application in mind.
The big difference is that, on Earth, the oxygen produced is not needed, but in space, it will be the most important product of the process. This means that it needs to be engineered to produce as much gas as possible.
Engineers will tinker to process the reagents to increase the amount of electrical current and age oxygen while trying to reduce the temperature required to produce it. This will help bring down the energy needed, which is already at a premium to the moon.
They will also work to reduce the size of the processed chamber so that it can transport efficiently to the moon.
In parallel, ESA and Metallurgy have challenged innovations to develop a process monitoring system that could be used to monitor the production of oxygen oxygen at future lunar extraction plants.
“A few years ago we realized that the potentially important by-product of our terrestrial mineral extraction process could have remote applications in space exploration,” said Ian Mellor, managing director of Metallisis. We will wait to continue, and our industrial partners, on how our Earth’s technological space is being prepared, “Mellor added.
“This exciting project is part of ESA’s vast space resource strategy that will help demonstrate how materials already present on the moon can be used sustainably to support long-term space efforts,” said Edwin Makaya, ESA Materials Engineer overseeing the project. .
“The project will help us learn more about the process of metallurgy, and could also be a stepping stone to install an automated pilot oxygen plant on the moon – with the added bonus of metal alloys that will be used by 3D printers to create building materials,” Makaya added.
“In the future, if we want to travel to space on a large scale and establish bases on the moon and Mars, we will need to create the things we need to support life – food, water and breathing air,” said Sue Horen, of the UK Space Agency. Head of Space Research at.
“The involvement of metallurgy in a program that aims to do just that, by producing oxygen on the lunar setting, will showcase the UK’s space identity on the world stage and help unlock success that brings future space exploration one step closer,” Horn added. (ANI)
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